Gara steps away from his drums on his solo debut, Limn, while violinist Neufeld finds a new rhythm on The Ridge.

Jamie O'Meara

Updated: March 23, 2016

Arcade Fire's Sarah Neufeld and Jeremy Gara both have Montreal shows coming up. Neufeld will be at La Sala Rossa on April 10, while Gara plays Théâtre Fairmount on March 26.Gesi Schilling, Brantley Gutierrez

The burning creative desires fuelling Arcade Fire have been a frequent source of solo flare-ups in recent years, and there are a couple more to keep an eye on in the coming weeks: Arcade Fire drummer Jeremy Gara and violinist Sarah Neufeld are both launching new music with concerts. Gara has joined the ranks of A.F. brethren Richard Reed Parry, Will Butler and Tim Kingsbury (as Sam Patch) with his debut record, Limn, while The Ridge is Neufeld’s second full-length solo foray.

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“I don’t write pop songs,” says Jeremy Gara. “I just want to hear something that makes me feel emotional … and that I can get lost in.”

Over the past year, hawk-eyed watchers of the 8G Band on Late Night With Seth Meyers will have noticed, from time to time, a face familiar to fans of Montreal’s most famous indie-rock export.

“I know all the people in (the 8G Band) from my past life,” explains Gara, who has been called upon to sub for busy bandleader, drummer and Saturday Night Live alumnus Fred Armisen. “My old punk bands used to play with Girls Against Boys, and Arcade Fire played with Les Savy Fav, so I already knew all the people in the Late Night band. They started subbing in drummers when Fred was away filming (Portlandia).

“I’m not a particularly flashy drummer, but I’m pretty quick on my feet, which is kind of what that gig is all about. It’s funny because you go in, you write songs that day and then perform them on the show, so it’s go-go-go. It’s a hilarious gig.”

As writing goes, it couldn’t be more different from the material Gara composed for his solo debut. By turns melodic and noisy, dense and ambient — and occasionally all of the above — the 10-track Limn is an unapologetically experimental effort that resists structure. Its tone is both cerebral and emotional, and though there isn’t anything approaching a narrative or stylistic through line, the album does have a unified and, notably, patient feel.

“The bits and pieces of it have been accumulating for years, really,” says Gara, who has been living in L.A. with other members of Arcade Fire for the last couple months. “I’ve been tooling around and collecting different samples and ideas for ages, so it probably feels patient because there was a lot of time spent on that material.”

Gara works using a variety of synths and a “little bit of straight-up computer manipulation” of field-recorded sounds he’s been compiling. There are no vocals and, despite his work on his fellow Arcade Fire members’ albums, he performs everything on Limn himself. Interestingly, there is also little to nothing identifiably percussive on Limn — something that is perhaps best characterized as accidentally deliberate.

“There’s no philosophical position,” says Gara. “It’s more just that I play drums all the time, including with all the other Arcade Fire solo projects, and I found that when I’m really allowing myself to go deep with the music I’m making, I’m not sitting at a drum kit.

“I don’t write pop songs,” he adds with a laugh. “I just want to hear something that makes me feel emotional … and that I can get lost in. And that’s what happened, and it had nothing to do with playing drums.”

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Sarah Neufeld says her second solo album, The Ridge, “goes to a more epic, more grandiose rock place” than 2013’s Hero Brother.

There are times when you need to get lost in your music, and there are times when you need to pull your head out of it. For Neufeld, Gara showed up right on schedule to help with the latter. He plays drums on The Ridge, the followup to the very well-received Hero Brother (2013).

“I had everything tracked before (Gara) came in, and that’s when I chillaxed,” says Neufeld, whose outside-the-Fire accomplishments include being a founding member of the instrumental ensemble Bell Orchestre, and one-half of a duo with saxophonist Colin Stetson.

“We had fun being creative and making it happen, and that kind of opened the floodgates for me, because I had moved through the personal scrutiny of recording this really difficult violin music and it was so lovely working together that I started playing synth bass and wanted to sing more. It was like, ‘This is great! You should come to the studio more often!’ ”

On The Ridge, Neufeld has swapped out the classical minimalism of Hero Brother for a rhythmic pop dynamism. The spare, wordless vocalization of the first album has transformed into actual (and excellent) lyric singing, and while the whole of The Ridge is as uncluttered and direct as its predecessor, there is definitely the impression of more — compositionally, technically, emotionally and acoustically.

“The biggest difference would obviously be the drums in the rock music kind of style,” offers Neufeld. “On Hero Brother I was concentrating on keeping it really, really minimal. Energetically, The Ridge goes to a more epic, more grandiose rock place than Hero Brother had.”

A lot of the fun on The Ridge comes from the fact that although all the songs make sense as a family, they’re sometimes as different as siblings can be. For example, compare the haunting, emotive and bare-bones They All Came Down against the plucky, upbeat and intricate track The Glow, which follows. It’s a contrast that Neufeld finds amusing. For good reason.

“Funny that you would think of those songs as polar opposites, because they’re actually the same song,” she says with a good-natured laugh. “It was too long, so I cut the beginning and called it a different song! You’ve got this narrative intro that’s very plaintive and personal, and then you turn this corner and come to this very esoteric, percussive, rhythmic throw-down with The Glow. But it’s just telling the same story in a different way.”

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